Gladiator’s Shield Wall

Tertel sends a message about an easy to acquire shield upgrade. With Season 3 out, there is a very nice, easy to get shield that will cost you nothing more than a little time. Let’s take a peek at the Season 1 [item]Gladiator’s Shield Wall[/item].

For the low, low price of only 15,000 honor points, plus 20 Eye of the Storm marks, this shield can be yours! I estimate that you should be able to net 500 – 1000 honor per hour, you’re looking at between 15 and 30 hours worth of Battleground grinding to acquire this shield. It does sound like a lot, but this is a guaranteed item, and a pretty good one at that.

The Gladiator’s Shield Wall has more Armor and more Stamina than the shield from Nightbane, [item]Shield of Impenetrable Darkness[/item] (the one in the screenshot here is enchanted with the +18 Stamina enchant).

So if you are looking for a sure fire way to acquire a shield upgrade, here is a great alternative to [item]Crest of the Sha’tar[/item] or [item]Azure-Shield of Coldarra[/item] if you have the defense to spare.

Comments

It takes 39.4 resilience to get -1% crit and it takes 59 defense rating to do the same. So if ou are looking to get crit immune, the gladiator shield has the equivalent of 43 defense rating – significantly more than the Nightbane shield. That extra buffer for crit immunity allows you to make allowances for other items that might lack defense. The armorsmith BP comes to mind as a desirable tank item that lacks defense and something like the gladiator shield allows you to get away with that. There is tons of plate with defense on it, but not nearly as much leather which is why druid tank often use resilience to get crit immune. Resilience makes a HUGE difference on resistance fights like Hydross, Mother Shahraz and Illidan where the tank may give up a lot of normal tank items in order to get to the resistance cap but in doing so they leave themselves shy of the crit cap.
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If you are looking at pvp gear, take a look at the S2 shield. It is a massive upgrade over the nightbane shield or the badge/sha’tar shield. Although it lacks a couple of the stats the Gruul shield has, the difference in armor more than makes up for it. I think the S2 shield is an upgrade from Gruul’s shield and if you are good at pvp, the S3 shield blows it out of the water. The S3 shield is almost as good as Kaz’rogal’s Hardened Heart. I don’t really know where the ZA shield falls in the spectrum since I haven’t spent much time there and don’t know the loot table well. I don’t know why, but I just don’t like that place… maybe it is the gay troll porn on the loading screen